The eastern end of Snæfellsnes is where the peninsula begins to feel the capital. For days we had been on the far western tip, where the stops are lonely and the parking lots empty, but leaving the peninsula and driving toward Borgarnes runs steadily back toward Reykjavík’s reach, and everything along the way carries the mark of that proximity: fuller car parks, built-up springs, a town on the Ring Road with a museum in it. From Borgarnes we turned inland onto the Silver Circle, the route that loops through the valleys of West Iceland, and this was a day of shorter stops, ending in a valley the saga describes.

Ytri Tunga

Our first stop was the beach at Ytri Tunga. The seals were present, hauled out on the rocks and sunbathing, but so far out along the shore that the only thing distinguishing them from the stone was the color of their bodies, until one of them moved. A single young one had come in close enough to watch properly, curious in the way juveniles are before they learn to keep their distance. What stood out more than the seals was the number of people watching them. The parking lot held more cars than any stop we’ve made on this peninsula, and the reason is proximity rather than spectacle: Ytri Tunga sits within a single day’s round trip of Reykjavík, close enough to draw the day-trip traffic that thins out the further west you go.

We left the beach and drove east along the coast, and a few miles on we turned off for a wall of rock above the road.

Gerðuberg

The cliff at Gerðuberg runs for several hundred yards as a single wall of basalt columns, hexagonal in cross-section, packed together like the cells of a honeycomb stood on end. The shape is what happens when a thick sheet of lava cools slowly and evenly, contracting into the geometric jointing that basalt takes when it has time to organize itself. We had seen the same pattern at Svörtuloft and would see it again further inland, but rarely this regular.

The rain that had been holding off all morning was beginning to settle in as we got back on the road, and it made our decision about the next stop for us.

Eldborg

Eldborg came next, or would have. It is a symmetrical volcanic crater a couple of hours’ walk across open lava field, and open lava field in steady rain is neither safe footing nor worth the view it would deny us at the top. We drove past the turnoff. The crater is about five thousand years old and will keep until we come back in better weather.

From there we carried on to Borgarnes, crossing the long causeway over the fjord into town.

Borgarnes

Borgarnes held the one stop of the day that had nothing to do with weather. The Settlement Center occupies two of the oldest buildings in town, a merchant’s house and warehouse from the 1870s and 1880s, connected by a newer hall built against the rock outcrop behind them. There are two exhibitions inside, each about half an hour with an audio guide, and together they cover the same ground from two different distances.

The first is the settlement of Iceland itself: why the Norse left western Norway, how they navigated open ocean before instruments, what a knarr carried across the Atlantic in livestock and timber and people, and how the land filled up in the sixty years between the first permanent settler and the founding of the Althing in 930. It is told plainly, without the heroics the subject usually attracts, and it holds to the practical problem underneath the whole story: how a few thousand people took an empty island and built a functioning society on it from nothing.

The second exhibition narrows from a nation to a single family, and it does so because that family lived here. Skalla-Grímur Kveldúlfsson, father of Egill Skallagrímsson, sailed from Norway about ten years into the settlement and claimed the valley that spreads inland from the town. Egils saga is his family’s story across three generations, and it runs through feud, exile, killing, and poetry in roughly equal measure. The exhibition is staged in the warehouse’s sunken stone cellar, in dim light, through a maze of low rooms where carved wooden figures stand in for the dead. Egill is the center of it: the saga records his first killing at six or seven, and his adult poetry is among the finest in the Old Norse language, the same intensity turned to opposite ends.

Neither exhibition is large, and neither tries to be. What they do is open up two thirteenth-century manuscripts that most visitors will never read and lay them out in a form that takes an hour to walk through. The modesty is the point. We ate lunch afterward in the café, at a table beside a wall where the raw rock of the outcrop had been left exposed and sealed behind glass.

We left Borgarnes and drove inland along the Silver Circle, into the valley Egils saga describes, following it toward the source that gives the region its hot water.

Krauma

That source is Deildartunguhver, the reason the valley has a spa at all. It is the highest-flow hot spring in Europe, boiling water breaking the surface continuously and steaming hard in the cool air, and it feeds the hot water supply of towns as far off as Akranes through the longest hot-water pipeline in the country. The Krauma complex is built beside it, baths and a restaurant drawing on the same source, but the spring itself needs none of that to be worth the stop. We looked at the water coming out of the ground rather than the pools it had been piped into, and then drove the last stretch to Húsafell through rain that had settled in for the evening, reaching the campground at dusk.